Haitian Conflict: Timeline & Latest Developments

Haiti’s current crisis is not a war between armies or states. It is a collapse of governing authority in which armed criminal gangs, not a rival government or foreign power, have displaced the country’s formal security institutions across most of the capital. The acute phase traces to July 7, 2021, when gunmen, including Colombian mercenaries, assassinated President Jovenel Moïse at his residence in Port-au-Prince. The killing left three men simultaneously claiming to be prime minister, and after US and UN officials backed Ariel Henry, the resulting political vacuum gave armed groups room to expand. Within months, the G9 federation was blockading the country’s largest fuel terminal, a pattern of gangs seizing critical infrastructure that would recur and intensify over the following years.

That pattern reached a breaking point on February 29, 2024. Two rival gang federations, G9 and G-Pèp, which had spent years fighting each other for territory, merged into a coalition called Viv Ansanm, Haitian Creole for “Living Together,” under the leadership of Jimmy Chérizier, a former Haitian National Police officer known as “Barbecue.” While Henry was abroad finalizing an international security agreement, Viv Ansanm coordinated attacks on Haiti’s two largest prisons, freeing roughly 4,700 inmates, and shut down Port-au-Prince’s international airport by firing on aircraft. Henry announced his resignation on March 11 and stepped down formally on April 25, replaced by a nine-member Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) drawn from Haitian political parties and civil-society groups, with a mandate to restore security and organize the country’s first elections since 2016.

The UN Security Council had already authorized a response the previous October: a Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission led by Kenya, granted temporary policing powers to help Haitian police confront the gangs. Its first 400 officers did not arrive until June 25, 2024, eight months after authorization. The mission never approached its planned 2,500-person strength; Kenya itself deployed fewer than 800 of the roughly 1,000 officers it pledged, and the broader force’s roughly $600 million annual budget ran roughly $200 million short. Two Kenyan officers were killed in gang ambushes in Artibonite department in 2025. Meanwhile Viv Ansanm and the Artibonite-based Gran Grif gang, both designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the US State Department in May 2025, expanded their reach: a Gran Grif attack on Pont-Sondé in October 2024 killed at least 115 people, a Viv Ansanm assault toward Delmas and Pétionville the following month killed roughly 220 more, and a January 2025 attack on Kenscoff, which Haitian officials later admitted they had advance intelligence on but failed to stop, killed as many as 150 people by some counts. By the time the last Kenyan contingent departed on April 28, 2026, closing out the mission, independent observers widely described it as having failed its core mandate, even as Haitian authorities credited its personnel’s commitment.

Security-force conduct in this crisis has drawn scrutiny of its own. In September 2025, explosive drones struck a gathering in Cité Soleil where a suspected gang leader was celebrating a birthday, killing at least 13 people including 8 children; a Haitian human rights group alleged the drones were launched by a national police task force targeting the gang leader, an allegation police did not publicly confirm. Human Rights Watch later documented this as part of a wider pattern of drone strikes raising risks to residents. In January 2026, security forces used attack drones in a more overtly military operation, destroying properties linked to Chérizier himself; he survived.

The Security Council responded to the MSS mission’s shortfalls by authorizing a larger successor on October 3, 2025: a UN-supported Gang Suppression Force (GSF) targeting roughly 5,500 personnel, with Chad, Bangladesh, and other contributors pledging troops. Its first contingent, a Chadian advance team, arrived April 1, 2026. By mid-2026, the GSF was still building toward full operational capacity from its Camp Vertières base, while gangs continued to hold an estimated 90 percent of Port-au-Prince and inter-gang clashes, not just gang-versus-security-force fighting, killed dozens in a single week in May 2026 in Cité Soleil and Croix-des-Bouquets.

The humanitarian toll has scaled with the violence. IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix recorded 702,973 internally displaced people in September 2024, a figure that had roughly doubled to 1,412,199 by September 2025 and reached 1,450,254 by December 2025, with 80 percent of the displaced now living outside the capital as violence spread into Artibonite and Centre departments. OCHA’s 2026 response plan estimated 6.4 million people, more than half of Haiti’s population, would need emergency humanitarian assistance, while IPC analysis found 5.7 million facing acute food insecurity. Hurricane Melissa compounded the crisis in October 2025, killing at least 46 people and damaging or destroying nearly 842,400 homes. Meanwhile Haiti’s political transition remains unresolved: the TPC’s mandate expired February 7, 2026 without elections having been organized, leaving Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé as sole executive under a civil-society pact, and by May 2026 he was publicly doubting whether the August 30 vote his own government had scheduled could still be held on time.